So I’m standing in line at the security checkpoint at the airport, and not even a long line at that (10 minutes?). Suddenly a gruff older man starts complaining to his wife next to me. He says, “If they had just taken that shoe-guy off the plane and shot him, we wouldn’t have to go through all this.” His wife asks, “What?” “The shoe bomber,” he clarifies. “If they’d just taken that shoe bomber right off the plane and executed him, we wouldn’t have to put up with all this security.”
It’s amazing how many wrong statements and assumptions are contained in this one little “argument”. Suffice to say that it’s hard to imagine that people who are willing to kill themselves and destroy an airplane they’re flying in, feet first, would be deterred by the threat of execution.
If you want to understand the simple-minded political discourse in the U.S., you don’t necessarily have to look much farther than the views of some of its citizens. And this guy was complaining about a ten-minute wait!
Skulls in the Stars 